A Novel Cell Traction Force Microscopy to Study Multi-Cellular System
Figure 1
Modeling of cell contraction on 1D elastic substrate with mixed boundary conditions.
(a) An elastic bar is discretized with 3 nodes with concentrated forces applying on each node along with their respective displacements. Note that this general loading is used for deriving stiffness matrix which uniquely relates nodal forces to the nodal displacement subject to any boundary condition. (b) A cell applies contractile forces on nodes 1 and 2 (i.e with known, measured displacements) while node 3 is free. This set of inputs constitutes a Mixed Boundary Condition, in that a combination of nodal displacements and forces are given () and their respective unknowns (
) are computed by the model.